Excuses, excuses (mine) — and it’ll be Nabokov vs. Huet in 30 minutes

CHICAGO — Hockey players and coaches say they don’t make excuses, but beat writers don’t have to play by those rules. So here are my excuses why it’s taken this long for the daily update.

The plane was stuck in Dallas an extra 90 minutes because of snow in Chicago. The Sharks didn’t have a game-day skate. The Internet connection in the hotel was down. I was functioning on less than three hours of sleep and getting a few more ZZZZZs was a higher priority than pounding these keys. The expressway crawl to the rink took longer than usual.

All that said …

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Evgeni Nabokov will be in goal tonight. So will Cristobal Huet, who’s pitched a pair of shutouts in his last two games for the Hawks.

And Todd McLellan will keep Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau and Dany Heatley together until the coach thinks he needs to shake things up once again.

One last tidbit: I asked McLellan if he planned to use that 7-2 thumping as a pre-game motivator.

“No,” he said. “They have good memories.”

David Pollak

David Pollak has been following the NHL forever and at the Mercury News as an editor or reporter since 1987. For almost a decade he wrote about the Sharks as the paper's Fan in the Stands before joining the sports department in 2001. He became the Sharks beat writer before the 2007-08 season and began this blog at that time. You can also follow him on Twitter at @PollakOnSharks.